The Credera Brief | Ideating, Prototyping, and Testing

During our previous The Credera Brief videos, Jake Carter, Chief Innovation Officer at Credera, discussed Credera’s Structured Innovation Approach and Innovation Prioritization Matrix. These two frameworks help companies pursue worthwhile innovations efficiently and effectively.

In this follow-up video, Carter explains Credera’s approach for the second step of the Structured Innovation approach—ideating, prototyping, and testing an innovation.

“Companies generally face two challenges when it comes to pursuing new products and services,” Carter shares. “First, there’s a lag between the time you think of a new service and the time you receive market feedback. Second, companies tend to commit to ideas before knowing if they’re ideas worth pursuing. These problems lead to waste and confirmation bias.”

To help companies address these challenges, we implement a design sprint, a four-to-five day workshop that tests innovations and helps companies pinpoint ideas instead of wasting resources and time. Design sprints work well for making decisions based on data rather than intuition, lead companies to valuable learnings quickly, and help organizations align behind a single understanding of an idea. 

Here are the five keys to running a successful design sprint:

1. BUILD UNDERSTANDING: Start by building an understanding with the team. What is the problem to be solved, and what does the future look like if it’s solved well? In this step, we map the user journey and interview users to understand their perspectives.

2. IDEATE: Spend time ideating. What are all of the ways one might solve the problem at hand? We facilitate through several exercises for team members to articulate their unique perspectives.

3. INTERROGATE: Interrogate the ideas to decide which one is the best solution to put forward. In this step, we review all ideas, break them down for a thorough analysis, and vote on the best concepts.

4. PROTOTYPE: Build a prototype of the best solution. A prototype can take on many forms (i.e., a mock user interface, brochure, or website landing page). The key is to create a prototype that looks and feels real enough for users to understand the concept.

5. TEST: Finally, test the prototype with users through one-on-one interviews. Here, we look for themes across users that tell us whether or not we’re pursuing a profitable idea.  

Watch Carter explain these concepts here: 

The Credera Brief

At Credera, we believe the toughest business challenges are best solved by a team—a team who works together to share knowledge to accomplish their goals. 

We created The Credera Brief series to distill down the trends and ideas from Credera leaders and experts. These short-form videos will share different insights and perspectives across the topic spectrum from MarTech and innovation to strategy and technology. 

You can find the complete series on our YouTube page, or reach out to findoutmore@credera.com to continue the conversation.

• Chief Innovation Officer
• Digital Innovation
• Innovation
• Innovation Development
• Innovation Management
• Innovation Prioritization Matrix
• Innovation Strategy
• Structured Innovation
• Technology Innovation
• Design Sprint
• Design Sprints